Posts tagged roleplayers

You're running a roleplaying event, and it's going well. It's lively, people are having fun, characters are playing off one another well, it's ideal. So you decide to push things a little further, to take things up a little more, and the next thing you see is people mumbling excuses and leaving unt...

Most of my Storyboard columns center on larger issues, providing advice in some way. This one does not. This one is purely about one of the elements of roleplaying in MMOs that I particularly dislike: using in-game random rolls to determine the outcome of actions during tense scenes (or out-of-game...

Sometimes, the biggest problem you face isn't whether or not you can find dramatic roleplaying but whether or not your character has a reason to keep subjecting herself to it.
I ran into the problem recently in Final Fantasy XIV. As a player, I enjoyed what was going on with one of the many organi...

I attend a lot of roleplaying events. This is not a surprise to anyone, I'm sure. What also probably isn't a surprise is how many of them turn out to be slow, meandering, and generally not all that great. It's like wading through any bunch of player-generated content; you've got a lot of people who...

Roleplaying friendships are like any other sort of friendship. The person you started roleplaying with at the launch of the game may not be someone you want to keep roleplaying with through the whole of your time with the game. The question isn't whether or not this will happen; it's when it will h...

I don't remember much of the poetry course I took in college whilst pursuing my (ultimately useless) English degree, but I do remember my professor quite vividly. The first day of the class he stood up in front of the room and wrote a line from renowned poet Theodor Geisel: "It's fun to have fun, b...

I'm a roleplayer at heart. My characters have backstories and relationships and hobbies and favorite foods. They have careers beyond "Necromancer" or "Guardian." They have homes and responsibilities. All of them have their own little places as supporting characters in the much larger story of Tyria...

Sometimes your max-level character in World of Warcraft is supposed to still be a student. Sometimes your Trooper in Star Wars: The Old Republic is an expert at hand-to-hand combat with a techblade that you can't wield. Sometimes your Final Fantasy XIV is a gunsmith in a world where guns clearly ex...

It's the day after Halloween, and that means we all take off our costumes. Or to be more accurate, we all take off the costumes that other people get to see. We're still wearing costumes just the same, except we call them our normal personalities and hope that no one notices.
None of this is shock...

Coming up with a new character concept is hard. Not as tough as it could be, obviously, but it's still challenging. For some people, the hardest part of roleplaying is figuring out whom to play, and once you figure that part out, the rest is just down to the execution. But coming up with a characte...

I've made it pretty far into October without a single article that could be seen as remotely Halloween-themed, so I think I'm doing pretty well right here. But that's changing right now because it's time to talk about another topic that I thought I'd covered long before: fear.
Unfortunately, fear...

Major organizations in a game's lore are kind of a big deal to the characters living in those games. They represent something important, after all, either in terms of intent or power. So why doesn't your character sign up with the organization of his choice and start working for it instead of just...